I Don’t Hate America!

Yes, we have even more video from yesterday’s ultra-fun anti-immigration tea party at the State Capitol.

In this clip we see Bill Ronan, a clinical social worker, state licensed psychotherapist, hypnotist, and practitioner of medical hypnoanalysis, claim that while well intentioned, the Violence Against Women Act is just a tool which enables illegal immigrants to obtain green cards.

According to Ronan, women routinely use VAWA to falsely claim domestic abuse in order to obtain a pathway to citizenship.

A member of the National Coalition for Men, Ronan’s clearly objective story about his background is given on its site:

Mr. Ronan married a foreign woman who then falsely accused him of domestic violence so she could invoke provisions of the Violence Against Women Act to gain citizenship. The courts refused to hear testimony or accept evidence from over 20 character witnesses on his behalf, including medical doctors, psychologists, social workers, clergy, and even his previous wife. Some of his character witnesses were harassed and terrorized. Mr. Ronan says that, “I am a member of NCFM because the organization is committed to the eradication of such gender biased injustice”. Mr. Ronan has an excellent reputation, is a leader in his areas of interest, and very concerned that our system of (in) justice favors political correctness over truth.

While I waited for my mooovie to process on YouTube and watched NASCAR, it didn’t take long for Sally Jo to pop around the internet and find some evidence contrary to the anecdotal claims Ronan made in his speech.  In fact, undocumented women still overwhelmingly face hurdles when legitimately attempting to obtain justice from VAWA.  A story from ILW:

For example, Blanca submitted a “self petition” under the Violence Against Women Act, after she separated from her U.S. citizen husband, who beat her for objecting to his bagging cocaine on the kitchen table while her children were in the house. The Vermont Service Center officer who decided her petition toyed with it and then denied it because he wanted her to tell him her “feelings.” The Administrative Appeals Officer agreed that the VSC officer was entitled to demand intimate details of the relationship to prove she married the abusive husband for legitimate reasons.

There was no question that the marriage was legitimate. If the couple had married only for the green card, then they would not have lived together and fallen out over cocaine and brutality. Most significantly, the evidence of legitimacy was not in any way questioned or contradicted. An ample preponderance of the evidence proved the fact. Implicitly, however, the two officers, both of whom are male, imposed a virtually conclusive presumption, with no basis in the law, that women who have been beaten by their husbands always lie when they say they married for legitimate reasons. The two officers illegally imposed an evidentiary burden on Blanca to overcome their invented presumption by far more evidence than would have been required to prove the fact in any court in the Free World.

Moreover, ILW disputes Ronan’s statistics:

Through 2007, three-fourths of the petitions filed by abused spouses were approved. Fewer than half of the 9,272 petitions filed in 2008 were approved. Records of the National Network to End Violence Against Women show that Blanca was not alone in being the victim of arbitrary bureaucratic action. Saying, “The VAWA unit must return to embracing the law, Gail Pendleton, Co-Director, ASISTA Immigration Assistance, explains that ’since the restructuring the C[itizenship and] I[mmigration] S[ervices], VAWA unit at V[ermont] S[ervice] C[enter] has denied VAWA self-petitions and U visas because of obvious ignorance about domestic violence and legal standards that violate the law. Because the CIS personnel who make policy can no longer communicate with the unit’s supervisors who are trained in domestic violence, there is no accountability for these wrongful denials.’

Check out the video of Ronan at IDHA’s YouTube channel here.

After all, not only is Ronan a hypnotist and all those other professional titles, he is a member of the Mensa High IQ Club and an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church!

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Tea Party, Domestic Violence, Immigration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.